


Lines

by branwyn



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Halloween, Horror, Original work - Freeform, Vandalism, Violence against Children, ghost story, violence in schools
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-15
Updated: 2013-10-15
Packaged: 2017-12-29 11:32:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1004922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/branwyn/pseuds/branwyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Something lives in the woods around the old playground. The kids all know it. Their teacher doesn't.</p><p>(An original work for Halloween, written a couple of years ago and published on a now-defunct blog.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lines

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tashilover](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tashilover/gifts).



> Gifted to Tash, because I'M SORRY, I'LL WRITE THE SLENDERMAN STORY ONE DAY I SWEAR.

As a teacher, I don't get sentimental about children. Never trust a teacher who does; that person isn't paying attention to their work.

I _respect_ children. I love them the way I love thunderstorms that black out the sky and wind that tears branches from tree-limbs. In other words, from a wary distance. 

Sometimes, when I look at my students, I think that if you could flip open the tops of their little cantaloupe-sized skulls and peer down inside, you'd find a miniature black hole or a tiny dark funnel cloud--a perfectly preserved fragment of the chaos we all come from. That's why children are able to see the world as it is, unfiltered. Adults lose that clarity as they get older.

When I first started teaching, I didn't understand all this like I do now. I was very young. I felt superior to my students, the way the third-graders felt superior to the first graders. But any teacher will tell you that you have as much to learn from your students as they have to learn from you. This is something you can only understand by experience.

Unfortunately.

* 

I was twenty-three. I was teaching fourth grade at a school on the outskirts of a large city in the South. In October of that year, something strange started happening around school grounds.

First, the playground was vandalized. I was the one who discovered the vandalism because I was, for no special reason, the first teacher to arrive at school that particular morning.

The windows of my classroom looked out over the upper playground. I raised the blinds, then froze, arrested by a vista of wreckage. Garbage lay scattered across the sand. A garden hose twined like a long green snake between the chains and poles of the swing-set. Profanity had been scrawled in black spray-paint on every flat surface, the kind of profanity that told me the vandals were young enough to think everyone was as easily shocked as they were. They'd lit a fire in a garbage can beside the plastic climbing structure my students referred to as "the fort". One whole side was black with soot. I could see grotesque faces in the melted plastic.

I don't know why the sight of the ruined playground affected me so strongly, but for a few seconds I felt as though the universe had re-ordered itself while I slept, and I'd awoken in a world where cats barked and birds meowed. I knew the vandals were probably teenagers. I wondered if they had gone to this school once, if they had targeted their old play space because they had bitter memories of being children here.

Eventually, I went to find one of the security guards, and I walked outside with her to survey the damage up close. I stood at the edge of the playground while she took a few steps forward and kicked aside some of the trash. A glint of green caught my eye in the cold light of the autumn sunrise.

"Glass," said Rhonda, digging in the sand with the toe of her shoe to reveal more glimmering shards. "Broken bottles. All over the damn place. They got to rake all this sand up and put some more down 'fore the kids can play here anymore."

"Varmints," I muttered, meaning the vandals. "What the hell are we supposed to do with them now?" Meaning my students. I had a chilling vision of a future in which I spent recess after recess coaching kickball games in the gymnasium. 

Rhonda squinted down toward the bottom of the field, out past the baseball diamond. "Nothing wrong with the old playground. We played there when we was kids."

I followed her gaze and looked out at the little cluster of jagged metal structures flush against the dense pine forest that surrounded the school grounds. "It doesn't look very safe," I said.

"Hell," said Rhonda, "like it going to kill those kids, scraping they knees up. Won't a day of my life I didn't come home with blood running down both my legs. That's why these kids so fat and clumsy nowadays, they sit around in front of they television and they computers and don't never fall down. They got to fall down some time, they better off to do it when they little."

* 

Later that morning, Dr. Tandy, our principal, poked her head into my classroom long enough to tell me exactly what Rhonda had already told me, namely, that we were to take our classes down to the lower playground for recess until further notice. I had drawn the blinds over the windows before the kids arrived, knowing that if they had the ruined playground to look at they would pay even less attention to me than usual. When I led them outside after lunch, they had to be threatened on pain of in-school suspension to keep away from the yellow caution tape Rhonda had looped around the swing, the see-saw, and the fort. Judging by their fascination and their reluctance to walk away, they seemed to think the vandals had made a major improvement on their play space.

"We're over here today," I said, gesturing to them to follow me down the slope of the field.

I'd thought that as soon as the kids realized they had new ground to explore they'd be on it like a pack of puppies, sniffing around and marking territory. Instead, they approached the old playground gingerly, surveying the bare metal jungle gym, the enormously tall slide, the rusted swing set, and most of all the encroaching forest, with dubious expressions. I didn't entirely blame them. All this jagged, twisting, rusted metal had a very different feel to the smooth, rounded corners of the bright plastic equipment they were used to. They were used to running and falling on soft sand, not hard packed red clay earth. I'd played on playgrounds like this one as a kid and I had the scars to prove it. 

I really, really hoped none of the little assholes got hurt. I didn't want to get sued. 

I sat down on the wooden bench and opened my grade book. As long as I didn't look at them directly, the kids always seemed to think that I wasn't paying any attention to them. This encouraged them to say and do things not meant for adult eyes, which was how I maintained my reputation for godlike omniscience. Pretty soon, three or four of my students had gathered beneath the shelter of the climbing structure, just within my earshot. I looked down at my work and tuned my ears to the frequency of their whispers.

"My brother," said a boy's voice, "he went here, and he said that a long time ago, some kid got--" _(Inaudible.)_ "They dared him, so he went way out in the woods, and--"

(The speaker's voice dropped low. I scooted a little further down the bench to hear him better.)

"He never come back after that. They never found him, neither."

Silence. Then a girl, speaking in a hushed voice: "I heard--" _(Inaudible.)_ "--so that was probably what got him."

"Why he wanna go up in there?" said a third boy. (I felt bad for not being able to put names to the voices, but honestly I've always been terrible at that.) "Ain't nobody gonna dare me to--"

"They were big kids. Bet they made him."

"Do you think it's still there?" said the breathless girl.

"Dunno," said the first boy. Then, more authoritatively: "Probably."

"So what if it comes out?" 

"It don't come out. It live in the woods, that's where it stay at. Just don't cross the line."

"What line?"

I stirred involuntarily, looking at the trees. I'd seen some creepy forests in my time, but in broad daylight the woods around the school looked just like any other clump of pine trees to me. Maybe they were a little denser and darker than you normally found around a school, but the South was just like that--trees everywhere. 

Still, my kids got bussed in from all over the place. This might be the closest some of them had ever been to real nature. Plus, Halloween wasn't that long ago. It was probably perfectly natural that they were making up scary stories. 

I did think, _if they're scaring the crap out of each other, at least it'll keep them from trying to sneak into the trees when I'm not looking._

In retrospect, this was probably naive of me.

*

The next morning, I stopped Dr. Tandy in the hall and asked if she had any idea when the upper playground would be cleaned and ready for use again.

"Not until after fall break, I'm afraid," she told me, sounding so harried that I didn't dare press the issue.

All that day, whenever the kids were left to themselves, at snack time, at lunch, at activity stations around the classroom, I seemed to hear snatches of an ongoing conversation, in which the phrase, "--lives in the woods" was repeated at intervals. I had my TA that day, so I warned Whitney to keep an eye out, and sent her outside with the kids at recess I could get a stack of spelling tests graded. About halfway through the period, I finished, and went to join the others outside.

As soon as I stepped onto the field behind the school, I knew something was wrong. It was too quiet, and the childish figures in the distance were clumped together, unmoving. I tried to catch sight of Whitney, but she was nowhere to be seen. My pulse sped up; I started to run.

Radio static, whispers, and the low, frightened sobs greeted me when I reached my class. Everyone was clustered around two kneeling figures: Whitney, and a short, round-faced boy named Ben, who was breathing fast and looked pale beneath his light brown skin.

"What happened?" I asked, stooping beside them.

"I was just about to call you," said Whitney, looking guilty and slightly tearful. "He--I don't know what happened, I was right there--"

"Ben, are you hurt?" I said, in my calmest voice.

Ben mopped the tears from his eyes. As he raised his arm, I saw the bloody tear in the sleeve of his yellow windbreaker.

"Jesus," I muttered under my breath. I raked the other children with my gaze, and the looks I gathered in return were unmistakably guilty. They were also fearful, but somehow I didn't think it was me they were frightened of. They were looking at each other, not at their feet.

"Ms. Griffin, why don't you take everyone inside. Ben, you come with me."

I waited for the rest of the class to get a little ahead of us before I helped Ben to his feet and started walking him toward the nurse's office. I was hoping he would be more talkative once we were alone. But he met all my questions with silence and head-shaking.

When the nurse had patched him up and called his mother, and I'd filled out the accident report, I returned to my classroom to put the fear of God into twenty-five ten year olds.

"I know that one of you saw what happened," I instructed them from behind my lectern. "This is no time to worry about being a tattle-tale."

Everyone looked down at their desks--including Whitney, still sniffling at the back of them room. Then a voice piped up from the middle row.

"We didn't see," said Samuel. He was a tall, serious red-haired boy, one of my brighter students. "He went in alone."

"Went where?" I demanded, pinning Sam with my gaze.

An uncomfortable silence. Then: "The woods."

"What was he doing in the woods?"

Chelsea spoke from beside Sam. She was tiny, bright eyed, and her many beaded braids bobbed when she spoke. "He was looking."

"Looking for what?"

But no one broke the hush that followed this.

"All right," I said, "listen up, because this is your only warning. I better not catch anyone else anywhere near the woods. You better not dare anyone to go into the woods, or see how close to the woods you can get before I catch you, or you'll spend every recess for a week scrubbing off the lunch tables in the cafeteria. Am I understood?"

They nodded in unison.

"I can't hear you."

"Yes, Ms. Bradford!" they shouted in unison.

"All right," I said. "Take out your reading books."

Just above the rustle of everyone reaching into their desks, I was sure I heard someone mutter, "I told him it was still there."

* 

After school that day, I found Rhonda again. "Listen," I said, "would you mind taking a look around in the woods by the lower playground? It's probably nothing, but one of the kids got hurt playing there today."

"You don't figure he fell down?" she said skeptically.

"No, I'm sure he did," I said hastily. "But I hear noises sometimes, and I'm worried someone might be hanging around out there. It happened at my friend's school. Some guy kept coming up to the fence, trying to talk to the kids." 

This was, technically speaking, a lie. But I figured it was a more convincing story, and I didn't want her to think I was wasting her time on my nerves. Even though that was exactly what I was doing.

"Yeah," she said vaguely, in between bursts of static from the radio on her belt. "Kids was all the time going up in those woods and getting hurt. We'd dare each other, you know. Thought we was something."

Suddenly, I felt guilty for asking Rhonda to go down there in my place--what if there really was someone down there? But then, she had a gun, and I didn't.

I left her and went home, figuring I'd see her the next day and she would set my paranoia at ease. But when I got to school that morning, Rhonda was nowhere to be found. I stopped Karl, another security guard, who, to my knowledge, didn't usually come into work until lunch.

"Yeah, Rhonda." He scratched his head. "She quit."

"What?"

"She call me last night, said I better go on and cover her shift."

I gaped at him. "Did she say why? Was she all right?"

He shrugged and ambled off down the hall, leaving me to stand and stare after him in bewilderment.

All the rest of that day I was distracted, trying to imagine why someone might decide in a single afternoon to quit her job. Maybe she'd been planning it for awhile. Or maybe she decided she was tired of getting sent on pointless errands by nervous teachers.

Deep down I probably knew better, even then. 

*

I took the class out for recess myself that day. I let Whitney stay inside and make photocopies. She seemed relieved.

When I caught sight of the lower playground, I thought at first that the vandals had struck again because the bare, scuffed earth was scattered with debris. I was startled by my first feeling, which was relief. I realized then that I would have been happy to coach kickball games in the gym from now till Christmas, if it meant never having to step foot on that playground again. 

But before I could recall my class and herd them back inside, I realized that what I was seeing was not trash. It was just leaves, dirt, and tree branches, as if there had been a windstorm in the night. I couldn't think how else to explain the pattern of the debris. It was almost violent. It made me think of a child in the middle of a tantrum flinging its broken toys far and wide. 

I started picking up some of the larger branches, so no one would trip on them. My students began to pitch in without my even asking. But instead of piling the wood in a neat heap, they arranged the branches carefully end to end, forming a barrier that divided the playground from the woods and the field. They didn't consult each other about the project; they barely spoke at all. But they worked together with a silent determination that I'd never seen before.

"What are you guys making?" I asked Samuel, as he passed me, carrying an armful of long, skinny twigs.

"We're building a wall," he said.

I opened my mouth to point out the logistical difficulties inherent in this project, then shut it again.

There was so much material to build with that by the time recess was over, my students had succeeded in constructing, if not quite a wall, then something like a low, jagged wooden fence bordering the playground in a circle.

"Good work," I couldn't help observing. But no one seemed to hear the compliment. As we walked away, I saw Samuel look worriedly over his shoulder. He stared at the fence like he was trying to make it bigger in his head.

*

The next morning I left the blinds open and watched the glowering clouds in the sky, praying for the rain to arrive. But the weather remained determinedly dry, so after lunch I took the kids outside. 

When we got to the playground, I nearly shrieked. The fence had been...well, flattened. 

That was the moment when I should have admitted defeat, made up an excuse, and taken the children back inside. Because I knew, looking at the destruction of the children's work, that the damage was deliberate. More than deliberate; methodical. Apart from one narrow gap where it looked something had been dragged through the twigs and branches, the circle they formed was unbroken. The effect was calculated to disturb. 

But: "Must have been another storm," I said loudly, my words sounding feeble even in my own ears. "Shame your wall fell down. Come on, let's--let's build it again. I'll help."

My students didn't even look at me. But Chelsea, who stood closest to me, looked at the breach where the fence lay closest to the trees. 

"I don't think so," said Chelsea. "It won't a storm. Why they ain't mud puddles under the swings?"

I stared at her, open-mouthed. I don't know _why_ I just stood there instead of going back inside. I couldn't explain what had happened, but that didn't mean I didn't know it was happening.

But I guess that was the lesson I had to learn: it's not enough to understand that your reality is changing. You have to change with it, for the knowledge to save you.

*

I turned my back for less than a minute.

I turned my back because I didn't want the kids to see me. Because I was afraid and indecisive and I didn't want them to know. Because I was clutching my radio in my hand and trying to think of a reasonable excuse to call Karl the security guard, so I wouldn't be the only adult out there anymore. I wasn't thinking clearly. I wasn't _thinking_.

Chelsea screamed. It was the kind of scream that spoke of terror and warning, rather than pain. Other children echoed the scream; I pivoted. The kids were running away from something, taking shelter behind the slide and the climbing structure. They left behind the body of Samuel--Samuel, with the red hair, Samuel who had told me that Ben went into the woods when he shouldn't, and that was why he got hurt. Samuel was lying on the hard earth, on the wrong side of the flattened stick fence. He held a long stick in one hand. He had been trying to close up the hole in the fence. 

I stared in complete shock for a few seconds. Then I ran over, heedless of anything but Samuel, and fell to my knees beside him.

"Sam." I grabbed his shoulder and bent low, positioning my ear next to his mouth. Something unclenched in my stomach when I heard him breathe. 

"His back," said a voice close to me, and I jumped. Chelsea was standing close to me, looking worried, but calmer than I felt. None of the other students were as close to the fence as she was, but even Chelsea was making sure to stay on the right side. 

Carefully, I turned Samuel onto his stomach to look at his back. There was a long rip in the back of his shirt. The flesh beneath it was torn, the edges of the wound jagged. Bright red blood was seeping onto the pale blue cotton of his t-shirt.

"Oh my god--right, ok. Did you see what happened?" I began struggling out of my jacket so I could cover him up. I pressed the call button on my radio, trying to reach Whitney, who didn't respond. "Did he fall down?"

"No," said Chelsea, insistent. She was standing at my shoulder. Gradually, the rest of the kids were approaching, forming a hushed perimeter around us. "He was just standing there trying to fix the fence, then he turned around, and I heard--"

"What?" I looked up at her. Her cheeks were tear-streaked.

Chelsea shook her head. "Something from there," she said, pointing at the trees. 

I reached for her hand and squeezed it, and picked up my radio again, trying to reach the front office. It took a long time, as though something were interfering with the radio, but finally I got through, and told them I needed paramedics.

As I knelt there, waiting, applying pressure to the wound on Samuel's back, I became aware that the children were whispering amongst themselves. 

It started with Chelsea. She'd stopped crying. I heard her gasp, and when I glanced up, I saw a flash of startled awareness cross her face. 

I thought she'd seen something. I jerked upright and looked around for the source of the danger. But Chelsea dashed away from me. She seized the nearest child, yanked her forward, and whispered something in her ear. 

The child turned white. Then she wheeled around to face the forest. 

Chelsea ran on to a cluster of three children a few feet further away. They reacted with the same look of terrified revelation, but they too faced the forest. The whispers spread, and one by one, all my students walked up to the ruined fence where it bordered the trees. They stood shoulder to shoulder, as though for a game of Red Rover. They formed a line between me and Samuel and the woods beyond, like they were blocking our view of something. Their skinny backs were rigid, their shoulders high and tight.

"What are you doing?" I shouted at them. "Get back! Go on, get away from there!" 

A minute later, Whitney arrived, out of breath and completely confused. I almost cried when I saw her. The children were still standing with their faces to the trees. A few of them were holding hands. The forest beyond groaned and swayed. In the darkness, I heard something moving. An animal, possibly (I knew it wasn't an animal. I've always wondered if Whitney heard it too.)

"Where were you?" I demanded, furious, even though I remembered how the radio had hissed and spit and fought me when I tried to make contact. "Go, take everyone inside." 

"Wh-what about Sam?"

I felt cold all over. I didn't want Whitney to go. I didn't want my kids to leave me there alone. But that was monstrous of me, I felt. I was _their_ teacher. "I'll stay here till EMS arrives," I told her. Then I raised my voice. "Everyone, follow Ms. Griffin, she's taking you in now."

One or two kids looked at me, at Whitney and Sam, over their shoulders. The rest looked at each other, or the trees. No one moved at first. 

Then, gradually, they turned away from the woods, trotting back toward the school. The more distance that fell between them and the forest, the more a spell seemed to fall away from them. Halfway up the field, they began to run and shove each other and flap their arms while they talked. It was like watching them pass into a different world. 

Chelsea was the last to leave me. She started to walk past me, then stopped. There was conflict in her wide brown eye.

"Don't turn around," she whispered, leaning down close to my ear. "Keep watching the trees."

She held my gaze for a moment, as though trying to decide if she should say something more. Then she ran, furiously, making up the distance between her and the rest of the class. 

Samuel's face felt wind-chilled under my hand. His breathing was slow. But in the distance, I heard the wail of an approaching ambulance siren. I didn't collapse with relief, but my shoulders did sag. And my head dropped.

I turned my face away from the forest and looked out in the direction of the parking lot where the ambulance would be arriving in just a few seconds.

"They're almost here," I told Samuel, who was still and silent. "You just hang on."

*

Two things happened at once. 

First, I heard a noise: a rushing in the trees, a crack of shattering limbs. I smelled a warm stench of animal decay, wafting toward me from the forest. It was like being breathed on by a mouth full of rotten teeth.

Then I remembered what Chelsea had told me not to do. 

I looked up. For an instant, in the space between blinks, I saw a shadow. A small, nearly child-sized knot in the dark trees. Moving fast. Toward me, and toward Samuel, who had fallen on the wrong side of the fence-line after repairing the breach.

I heard a rasp, almost like a voice. I felt it vibrating in my stomach, shooting into my veins and racing toward my brain. My mind, housed in the nerve-centers of my body, was no longer safely intangible. It was just meat. I was just prey. I was tiny, weak, my body paralyzed, my thoughts violated by a hatred so strong that it possessed shape and dimension. 

I would like to tell you that I stayed there, crouched over Sam, because I was determined to protect him. The truth is, fear, at its purest, bypasses every higher impulse and commands the body to survive at any cost. I believe that is why, though I would wish to believe otherwise, I sprang to my feet in that last moment. Not to fight. Not to protect the unconscious child at my feet. To flee.

But I was already too late. All the sensations I have described occurred in the space of a second. The crucial opportunity had already passed. I had spent it wrongly. 

Whatever it was that lived in the dark of those woods had already caught me by the roots of what was left of my mind. I couldn't run. I couldn't do anything, except feel all that it wished to make me feel: the heat of its breath, the tearing fire in my stomach. The world I had known falling away as surely as the earth under my feet, as it raised me in its jaws and carried me into the forest, along the path it had prepared.

* 

The paramedics were very close. When Samuel awoke, and asked where I was, they began to search immediately. I was lying at the bottom of a culvert, tangled in the leavings that carpeted the forest floor. My abdomen was torn open. They found me lying there like a rabbit abandoned by a hawk before its meal was complete.

Nearby, they discovered the partial skeleton of a child, indistinguishable at first from the bones of other small animals that had been washed into that particular depression in the earth. The skeleton had been there about fifteen years. The boy was eight or nine when he died. If he'd lived, he would be my age. They identified him eventually, but not until after I'd moved out of that city and back to my parents' house. 

My family never suggests that I go back to teaching. I'm grateful for that. I think that, if I did, I would be a better teacher than before. But then I dream about my old students: they tug at me, hang on my arm, cry _teacher, teacher_. They demand that I stop, that I listen, that I look into their open mouths and acknowledge their needs. 

I wake up thinking: there is no worse crime in the world than for an adult to ignore the need of a child. 

When I talk to teachers now, I tell them the story of the second grader at my last school who was dragged into the woods fifteen years ago and beaten to death by three teenagers. I tell them about the skeleton that lay in the woods, and the boy who lay there before it, dying alone, angry and frightened and needing. I do this as a warning. I'm sure they think the warning is for the sake of their students. 

But it's for them as well. And it's a reminder to me, that I failed once, so it's probably best that I just steer clear of children now. 

I doubt I'd survive the consequences of failing a second time.


End file.
